IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 26 Lucinda's Band
Saturday, May 16, 2708,
continued No night falls so black as
in the jungles of the Charadoc, canopy under canopy under clouds. No one could've invented astronomy down
here. We have only the constant
twinkling of sounds for stars, the drip of water here and there, the night-hawk
and the chittering bat, the cricket and the cheeping poison-frog. By ambient sound we steer towards a clearing
at last, dead tired, groping past trunks, through vines, till trunks and vines
all finally fall away and we step into the faintest glimmer of mist-veiled
stars, still beyond distinguishing face from face. Lucinda whistles
"Friends!" and other bodies, barely guessed at, emerge from shadows
of shadows. Hands lift our packs and
weaponry from our shoulders. I hear a
liquid sound and find my fingers guided to bowls of cool water to wash my
travels off of me. Now someone unfurls
blankets on the ground for us, the thick, ones made by Petro, good enough for beds when spread out on the ferns and grasses. With a groan of relief I strip off my clothes, unbraid
my hair, and sink down into them. In the dark I can feel the grommets that can turn them into hammocks if we want. Now, half-reclining, we
pass the pipes around, sharing a tobacco communion. The glow gives hints of old and new faces,
nothing clear enough to need introductions all around as yet, just tantalizing
glitters of eyes or gleams of cheeks in fiery orange-gold. Dark--but nothing at all
like the dark of the cave. Dark rioting
with scents and textures and living sounds and human touches anonymously
kind--a brilliance of all the senses save for sight. Contentedly at last we tap out the spent
ashes, then snuggle into our covers for the night. Lucinda stretches herself out onto the hard
ground with an extravagant sigh, murmuring, "Who needs pillows? Y'can get soft like the pillows, if you don't
watch out. Gimme the good dirt under
me--makes you sleep light, sleep safe.” Sunday, May 17, 2708 In the morning we get
potato mush for breakfast and a good look at the people that we slept beside
the night before. Two boys and a girl--I
thought they'd all been girls in the dark. "Gaziley!" Lufti
blurts, then ducks his head like someone would hit him for his outburst. "It's okay,"
Damien tells him, smiling wryly. "I
don't think Cyran'll punish you for recognizing anyone who's already a
rebel." "Oh,
Gaziley!" Lufti abandons his
breakfast to leap up and hug the other boy, who just stands there with his arms
at his sides. "I ran away because
of you, Gaziley--you inspired me--I knew we'd meet again in Cyran's
bands!" Then he sees the kid's eyes
up close. "See, Kiril? I told you it's all right for boys to wear
eye-liner when we're rebels." Then he sees the look in
those eyes and he steps back, confused.
Gaziley pushes him away.
"Little idiot!" he hisses, his glare as blackened as the
jaquar's, and the dark roots of his bleached curls only make him look more wild. He hugs himself and stalks
away, unconscious of how he sashays, just as he'd been trained, no doubt. Without turning to face us
he says, "I wear it so that certain...certain persons will recognize me
when I kill them. Whenever I find
them. Whenever the chance crops
up." He storms away to brood. Gruffly Lucinda says,
"He didn't find Cyran right away, Lufti, anymore than I did. Madame dragged him out of an alley, bled half
to death from what he wasn't shaped for, nursed him back to health, and taught
him safer ways for little boys to please big men. But he'd already joined The Profession when
we'd found him." For awhile we hear nothing
but the birds. Lufti stands there
uncomprehending, and I don't want him ever to comprehend, but he must if he
ever hopes to understand the fury in his friend. "Chulan," I ask, "can you take
Lufti aside and find a gentle way to explain it to him?" She nods, takes Lufti by the hand and leads
him into the brush. Our tallest
host--Teofilo--stares after them a moment, and then says softly, "I had it
easier." The handsome youth, of a
height with me, picks up a couple buckets on ropes and hands one to me. "I started my career much older than
Gaziley." He laughs and says, “And
it wasn’t like I was a virgin to a man’s embrace--or like I minded.” He glances down, suddenly
shy. Those long lashes must've added to
the price. I follow him to the well as
he says, "It's the lack of love that got to me, after awhile--the
condition of being a thing." Such a
beautiful sculpture of a man, though, with those high Mountainfolk cheekbones. Together we struggle with
the stone that caps the well, and even now, straining at the weight, he seems
graceful in every move, muscles curving within the slender sleeves. At last we shove it off between us. "That's when I realized that my entire
training from birth had shaped me to be just this--an object, a
commodity." He lowers his bucket
down and draws it back up full, grunting a little with the effort. "No matter how I educated myself, hoping
by some miracle to get a scholarship, go to a real school, get myself some
votes. Things don't vote--everybody
knows that." "And so that's why you
became a rebel," I say as I lower down the second bucket. "That's why I became a
rebel." "And you?" I say
to the black-haired little beauty who follows us. She's still so young that she only hides her
face in her hands and giggles. "Why
did you join Cyran's cause?" We
walk back carefully, trying to keep our buckets from slopping over, and she
tags along behind without a word, just another giggle every time I glance back
at her. At last the youth tells me,
"Aichi never had to go to Madame's, at least." She loses interest in us to climb a tree and
investigate some orchids in a branch's crotch.
"We intercepted her early on--starving but unmolested." Teofilo glances up to see if she's listening,
then leans over and whispers to me.
"She's simple, okay? And not
near as young as she looks, just stunted.
Happens, when they're born hungry and stay that way." I look over my
shoulder. Up in the tree, now a ways
behind us, I can hear her make a cooing sound as she plucks an orchid and tucks
it behind her ear. Teofilo says,
"Yet you tell her where to shoot, and she'll hit her mark every
time." I turn so fast I splash
half the water from my bucket. "How
dare you!" is all I manage to gasp. "Use her?" he
asks. "Would you like us better if
we left her for others to use--like what happened to the rest of us?" Aichi shinnies down her tree and scampers
after us, shouting, "Hey!
Hey!" in a deeper voice than I expected. "We have no safe place to send her, now
that they're shutting down the orphanages." Fatima comes up
unexpectedly and takes my bucket from me.
She smirks and says, "Shutting down--is that how they're putting
it, Teo?" "Blowing up,
whatever." The shock hits me like a
blast--I visualize something so vividly--nuns and children hurled into the
air--that I almost could've sworn I'd seen it, choked on the very smoke of it,
felt the sting of flying gravel hit like shot. "What a pretty orchid,
Aichi!" Teo says, as she sort of dances before him, laughing, the flower
bruised and dangling face-down from her ear.
Suddenly she darts away again and disappears into the rainforest, as
lightly as a fairy-child. To me he says,
"We can't send her away, and we can't keep dead weight. So we taught her how to shoot." Oh great.
An idiot savant at killing. And
what, pray tell, do they intend to do with her if they ever actually win the
revolution? Fatima piles the wood
around the basin as we fill it up with water, then tucks tinder into the
chinks. Aichi crashes back out of the
foliage into our clearing, laughing and chanting, "Fire! Fire!" in her strange, deep voice, as
she flaps her hands excitedly. "Yes, Aichi,"
Fatima tells her. "We're going to
light a fire." "Boom! Boom!
Boom!" "No, Aichi. We won't blow anything up this time. We're heating wash-water, that’s all." Aichi sulks, her lip stuck
way out, and walks away, but soon the smoke and the crackling draws her
back. She lies down on her tummy to
watch the flames rapturously as we boil our pots and cutlery. |
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